The different treatment of the family in Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas can be explained by the fact that they draw on different parts of the Bible. In their actual lives, it appears that Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas may have exercised charity to the family in a somewhat different way. While there are a number of rules for the practice of charity at the community level (such as tithing or a fair distribution of the land of Israel among the tribes), giving at the individual level follows Saint Augustine's "luck of the lot".
10 Augustine of Hippo, "Letter of St. Augustine to Marcellinus," in Church Fathers: The Letters of St. Augustine vol. Perhaps most importantly, the book expresses God's lesser love for sinners—“The Most High himself hates sinners and the wicked. St. Augustine sees the multiplication of loving relationships as the foundation and engine for building the city of God.
The ideal for St. Augustine is to have a society in which all people are connected in friendly relations of love.
Friendship and Love in Saint Thomas
Knowledge, Affinity and Society
Arguably, from the statement in Sirach 6:6 to "[l]let your acquaintances many but one in a thousand be your confidant," Saint Augustine emphasized the first part while Saint Thomas the second. Saint Thomas openly argues that he disagrees with Saint Augustine's view that one should love everyone equally. He counters that it is an “unreasonable position” that is neither possible nor desirable.39 It cannot be because one will always have a greater affinity or intensity of feelings for some people than for others: “It is also clear that, according to natural love, our relatives are more loved in affection; according to a social love, those who are close to us are loved more…”40 According to Saint Thomas, those who are more like us are also loved more.41 It is not desirable to love everyone equally, because God Himself loves more of the virtuous than of the less virtuous.
Saint Thomas's view of the social nature of human beings seems to be based on Sirach's principle. Sherwin, By Knowledge & By Love: Charity and Knowledge in the Moral Theology of St. Weltanschauung, which has strong Aristotelian echoes, "each creature has more of a tendency to the universal good than to its own species."42.
This is so because a) "love for divine love is a certain tendency rooted in rational nature for the purpose of leaning towards God"43 and b). Therefore, in the Holy Roman Empire of the time of St. Thomas, as in the Aristotelian city-state, harmony appears. In this, St. Thomas argues against the 13th-century natura curva doctrine, attributed to St. Bernard, that nature primarily desires its own good.
In the Secundum Librum of the Summa, Saint Thomas uses his understanding of Aristotelian teleology to reinterpret natura curva to mean that nature has a tendency not only for its own perfection, but even more for the perfection of the whole. Even Saint Thomas recognizes that not everyone will work together for the formation of such a society. Not everyone is able to cooperate in a particular way.”47 Thus, cooperation takes place in a world where individual and social interests are assumed to be compatible and ultimately reflected in the pursuit of the common good by persons in positions of authority in formal institutions. .
Potential Influences on the
Different Views of the Order of Charity in Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas
Subsequently, in the monastery at Hippo, Saint Augustine created an environment where "uneducated men were the equals of the sophisticated."51 Moreover, as a bishop, he was drawn to attend to the needs of a flock of necessarily varying degrees of education. and virtue. He was the result of the good that can come from the associations between the "virtuous". He was an important witness to the enormous potential of humanity and the immeasurable good that comes from togetherness among the diverse.
It was also characterized by the practical inability of a loving heart to ignore the need to love, regardless of virtue. At the same time, he had extensive experience with the inequality in the distribution of intellectual gifts and with the need for intellectual charity. In fact, Saint Thomas does not include necessity and chance among his criteria in the order of love, but he practiced them in his intellectual love.
He was extremely generous in the way he responded to every question put to him, even if it imposed and burdened his time, distracting him from his main treatises on systematic theology. Saint Thomas was thus arguably compelled by need and chance in the choice of his intellectual output - the greatest charitable work of his life. Had he been under such circumstances, he would have reacted as he did to the dissemination of his intellectual charity: letting need and chance play a part in practice, if not in theory.
Moreover, St. Augustine could be considered part of the first group for most of his life, while St. Thomas was part of the second all his life. Therefore, for St. Augustine, the life experience of the centrality of need and chance in conversion may have shaped his order of love. Although in the case of St. Thomas the principles of virtue, friendship among equals, and utility for the common good are strong in his moral theology, they are probably less so in practice.
The institutions of the Roman world were crumbling and the Church struggled while remaining resilient. Christians and their perceived weak citizenship were blamed for the collapse of the Roman Empire. Saint Thomas, on the other hand, was born in southern Italy, a center of the Holy Roman Empire of the 13th century.
He could also leave it to the role of formal institutions to build the foundation for a stable society. Finally, St. Augustine seemed to rely on necessity and chance, and St. Thomas on the utility of the common good. The various societies of St. Augustine also parallel the Christian communities as well as the participants in Plato's dialogues, each contributing its own unique part to the search for truth and goodness.
Aristotle shares Plato's idea of both the reality of existence and the desirability of order in nature and society. At the same time, he has a more pronounced teleological view of human action and human interaction than Plato. This beginning of the end in Aristotle's Ethics may also help to explain the difference between St. Augustine and St. Thomas in regulating charity.
While for St. Augustine the need as a guiding principle of charity is seen as applicable to the individual for his own sake, in St. Thomas it is transformed into the benefit of the individual for the common good. In this regard, St. Thomas's inclusion of the principle of virtue as a critical guiding criterion for the exercise of divine love also seems profoundly Aristotelian. This idea of the common good is central to St. Thomas, including his idea of the order of charity.
According to Aristotle, the state's ability to act for the common good depends primarily on the education of all its citizens. 72 I do not know the specific role that St. Thomas played at the Dominican chapter in 1259 in Valenciennes.
P erSoNality
Finally, there is a further influence on the order of love, as seen by St. Augustine and St. Thomas, which is rooted in their respective Platonic versus Aristotelian perspectives. St. Augustine derived his theology and political theory from a psychological-sociological worldview with a strong normative and metaphysical bent and a certain skepticism about method. As discussed, St. Augustine's lifelong experience of friendships with people of widely different educational and social backgrounds, as well as his own and his father's conversions, must have fostered this personal tendency to understand all and to be made friends with everyone.
Additionally, Saint Augustine's idea of friendship is based on trust and involves serious risks. The intensely personal tone revealed in most of Saint Augustine's writings reflects a person comfortable with having his personality shine through his work. A person with such a preaching persona would also be more inclined by personality and function to prepare the establishment of personal relationships in the community structure as well as to leave the judgment, including on the order of charity, to an individual's necessarily subjective assessment of the order of charity . , which must be engaged in through "coincidences".
Finally, Saint Augustine's independent personality, with its anti-hierarchical, anti-establishment leanings, might have influenced his preference for a fluid order where an individual can make their own judgment about the order of charity based on the broad principles of family, need and opportunity. Saint Thomas was a man of the spirit: contemplative, self-controlled, with a preference for deep conversation or solitude. Thomas doesn't have that [Saint Augustine's] brilliant style, that verbal grace, that musk; he doesn't have that personal tone either.
Like Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas was an independent thinker and a systematic questioner in search of the truth. Unlike Saint Augustine, however, he had a much deeper reverence for the knowledge of the leading philosophers of the time, regardless of religion. As a 13th-century Dominican master, he could be seen as having lived in a Christian version of the small communities of "virtuous philosopher friends" advocated by Aristotle.
Conclusion
